BRINGO Blog

I attended a great conference last week (not only great because it was in Orlando while I am in cold Chicago)….but also because of the quality of speakers. I was giving the talk on Healthcare and Technology, particularly how payers and providers can embrace the internet and leverage the power of new technology to grow their businesses and their practices. For those of you interested in the conference….it already happened but here’s the link: http://www.iirusa.com/dentalbenefits/eventhome/35951.xml

Okay, onto some fascinating data points shared by presenters that got my attention and should get yours:

1) According to a study by IOM (Institute of Medicine), it takes an average of 17 years from the time when a new discovery/treatment that is proven effective (e.g. treating ulcers with medication) for that treatment to become widely practiced.

2) According to a study by NCQA, 57,000 people die every year in America because physicians are not following clear trends from ”evidence-based medicine.” Said another way, this is the staggering cost of the 17 year delay game because it’s hard to spread information throughout our fragmented health care system.

3) We all know about the challenge of rising Medicaid and Medicare costs. We also know that we sometimes get better data from the government sponsored programs than we get from the fragmented insurance industry, so from both perspectives….think about this….The Institute of Medicine did a study in 2006 that found 50 cents of EVERY $1 dollar spent by Medicare was spent in the last 8 weeks of a patients life.

4) Some other engaging Medicaid/Medicare facts: these programs cover 65% of all nursing home residents in the United States (44% of all nursing home costs). In 2005, Medicaid passed up Medicare in terms of the # of lives covered. In an average month, there are 49 million Americans covered under Medicaid.

Fascinating stuff. Data can help us understand our costs better, help patients and providers make better choices, and even start a discussion about how we as a society spend our valuable healthcare dollars.

Stay warm everyone….the winter is almost over….

Thanks,

mark

Via the “Medical Quack” blog:

A recent article in the SF Business Times finds that the proliferation of ratings and reviews is having little effect on consumer behavior because it is confusing them.

Based on our experience, I’m not sure whether the conclusion is totally correct — we have seen a positive effect in generating new business for dentists and other healthcare providers based on positive reviews that we have helped them generate through their patient bases.  My guess is that the effect of the reviews probably depends on the sector and the source of the reviews - and the effect may not be as measurable in the aggregate, but for individual healthcare practices that manage their online reviews well, it can make a big difference in generating new patients.

I had meant to blog about this earlier, but it somehow got lost in the holiday rush.

TechCrunch published a great chart that shows the traffic for the various Google properties. Google Maps ranks 4th, behind general search, image search, and GMail, and also posted one of the top growth rates of all the properties (52% growth from a pretty large base of traffic).

Coupled with the recent research that shows that online resources such as maps and local search has surpassed offline media as the main place people look for local businesses, it’s obvious that paying attention to making sure your practice is visible across the most important and fastest growing online properties such as Google maps.

How do you make sure your practice is visible? While conventional wisdom says that you need a website to get started on the web, the business listing is also becoming increasingly important. In fact, for many of our clients, business listings in local directories and those focused in dental, chiropractic and other healthcare-related spaces provides a significant percentage of new patients we drive to their practices, and are often more ready to set up an appointment (begin further down the decision-making cycle).

Business listings appear on Maps whenever a user searches for a dentist, chiropractor, or healthcare provider in their area from the Maps or Local interface. In addition, it appears on the main search page (if it is optimized correctly) when someone searches on a geographic- and category-related term (such as Dentist San Diego, or Chiropractor Chicago). A basic business profile may already exist in many of the properties for your practice — most of the big players buy their data from big data clearinghouses and pre-populate basic information to fill out their directories. However, I’d advise taking a closer look at what’s contained in those listings, as most potential patients will want to know more about your practice than simply name, address, and phone number. Most directories will allow you to add additional information such as a practice description, office hours, specialties, languages spoken, parking availability, and other information that is important to potential patients. Providing and updating this information is important, as the more complete the information is, the more likely a patient will pick up the phone and call you to set up an appointment.

One other thing to notice is that many of these directories collect and/or aggregate consumer reviews. This is also becoming increasingly important to marketing your practice, as managing reviews can make or break the image your practice has online. I will write more about this topic in upcoming posts.

Chris Smith at Search Engine Land posts a useful article about the many things to think about when creating and optimizing your business listing to become visible potential patients who may search for you on the Internet:

http://searchengineland.com/071217-081815.php

Based on our experience with our clients, the local listing is a basic building block for driving online patients to your practice. Many of the topics that Smith touches on are accurate — we work with our clients to make sure the important ones for their practices are covered, including making sure the address is correct and represented correctly on the various mapping services, office hours, languages, areas served, payments, and services provided.

Once the basic listing is created, it is then important to distribute the listings across the myriad of places where patients are searching, including Google Local, Yahoo Local, Microsoft Live, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Local.com, Citysearch, Yelp, and dozens of others. We’ve found that a well-managed and optimized listing can provide dozens of patient phone calls a month, and be a key part of a successful online marketing strategy for our clients’ practices.

Most people have a sense that the Internet is becoming a more and more important medium for people to find things in general, but how does that tie back to healthcare providers who are looking to find new patients?

According to WebVisible/Neilsen, the Internet has surpassed traditional print media as the # 1 place where consumers look for information when making a purchase from a local business (courtesy of Greg Sterling):

(click to enlarge)

Search engines have surpassed the print Yellow Pages as the top place people look, with several other online venues also prominent (Online Yellow Pages, Consumer Review websites).

Based on our experience with our clients, the healthcare space follows this larger trend where users increasingly look online. The mix is slightly different and more fragmented than the above chart shows (search engines tend to occur early in a consumer’s search process, whereas some of the other more specialized media specific to this space tends to be important to the decision process as well). The mix also will differ often based on geographic area as well (some sites are more important on the West Coast, or in certain cities).

While for many healthcare providers, it is natural to spend thousands of dollars a year on yellow pages ads, many of them are not following their potential patients online, and thus missing out on a huge opportunity. Potential patients are out there looking on the internet for information about providers and also talking about specific providers and comparing them to the competition.

Finding these patients online and getting involved in the online conversationcan be a daunting task for those who are not familiar with where to look and how to manage them, but as patients move more and more online, those who don’t make themselves visible there risk being left behind.

Booz-Allen published a new survey this month on how consumers and health-care providers are adjusting to consumer-driven healthcare.

Still going through this in detail, but some key interesting points:

- As costs are pushed toward the consumers (through high-deductible plans and the like), consumers are increasingly shopping for value (price/quality) in choosing healthcare providers

- Consumers are not finding the information they need to effectively compare providers and make the price/quality decisions they want to make

- There is a disconnect between the information consumers are beginning to demand and what providers are able or willing to provide.

Based on the above, this fits in well with a few things we’re working on here at BRINGO. More on this later.

If you’re like me, you have heard the words “consumer driven healthcare” associated with lowering our healthcare costs from President Bush’s State of the Union to the healthcare debate in Congress…to news articles…etc…but I keep scratching my head and wondering when I’m going to read about HOW!

In our healthcare system, most are insured via their employers so to evaluate true rising costs we can use the rising healthcare premiums as a good proxy (hey, those carriers have armies of actuaries tracking this stuff). The good news/bad news is that in 2006 premiums rose more slowly than any other year since 1999. The bad news is, that’s still twice as fast as inflation and almost three times faster than salary increases. It doesn’t take Lou Dobbs to do the math on that one. And the irony is….this is good news as this is a lower rise than we have had in 7 years. Since 2000, health insurance premiums have gone up 87% while wages have only gone up 20%. Ouch.

In the 90’s the cost-saving strategy was to push everyone into HMO’s, thereby limiting access to non-essential healthcare by creating “gatekeepers.” While it worked for a short time, the general public did not like the limitations on access and the insurance carriers (who are ultimately businesses) plummeted in popularity. I recently heard a great talk by one of the senior executives of Great West, and he said today the insurance carriers have a favorable rating only 1% higher than the tobacco industry. So I wouldn’t expect any revolutionary or controversial strategies coming out of the insurance carriers anytime soon but they know better than anyone else that 7% of the US insured population is driving 82% of the healthcare costs.

So where will good ideas come from? At this moment, it seems two places: State Governments and employers themselves. No one in the industry thinks the federal government will act before the 2008 elections, so it’s left to individual state’s to take action. Massachusetts and California are leading the way with mandatory health insurance requirements for their citizens (Mass has already passed, and CA is considering). Watch what CA does, as they will likely set the tone for the debate in Washington after the 2008 elections.

Employers, on the other hand, seem to be focusing on health and wellness initiatives to address that 7% of the population that is driving the majority of the costs. If you can’t limit access through HMO’s or national waiting lists, then you have to try and solve the problem another way…make people healthier. I applaud this route and will look for some great anecdotes to share on how employers are trying and succeeding to help their employees get healthier. Does anyone have some good ones to share?

So back to consumer driven healthcare. In simple words, the hope for consumer driven healthcare comes from the simple notion that putting responsibility for expenses and decisions back into the hands of the consumer will result in more rational utilization of resources. In other words, make employees pay a greater share of their costs, and they will become more informed about what they need. Create high deductible plans, let consumers put money into HSA’s, put consumers on the hook for the pain of over-spending. Great in theory, but the reality of this means consumers need HELP making more informed decisions. They need information about everything from costs, provider quality, options for expensive hospital visits, access to preventitive care, etc….and where will this great data come from?

Well, as far as I can tell, I’m not seeing it come from carriers, employers, or governments….but rather data-driven internet businesses like us. Take a look at www.mymedicalcontrol.com where you can actually get help negotiating better rates with providers (e.g. if you walk into a hospital from the street and pay in cash, you will pay an average of $3 for every $1 Medicaid would have spent on the exact same care). We at BRINGO can help consumers make good decisions about finding general dentists in their area rather than wait for a dental emergency to strike. Other sites are working (like we are) on developing some good cost comparison information. Of course, you’ve all heard about WebMD and their focus on content. www.realage.com does a great job of helping individuals better understand their own health IQ.

So while the healthcare debate heats up in Washington, across the state capitals, in corporate boardrooms, on the campaign trail and on TV, some of us folks are trying to make sense of “consumer driven healthcare” by providing our consumers with more information and the ability to make better decisions. Good old-fashioned American entrepreneurism may help lead the way to controlling healthcare costs.

Anyone else have good examples of health care ingenuity at work?

Signing off for now…

-Mark

There are always important milestones in launching a business, and today was another key milestone for our www.bringodentist.com We have had enough momentum with dentists in Chicago who are signing up to participate in the BRINGO program that today we really started driving consumer traffic. We are getting smarter by the day on our key metrics (conversion, click throughs, etc…), so this represents yet another step forward for us.

Over the past two weeks, we have been training our Chicago dental offices and getting them ready for the consumer traffic. We then tested those offices by sending out some “sample” calls from one of our team members to see whether they would be accepted or not (meaning did the office understand the training and the platform). The acceptance ratio was through the roof, and the general feeling was that the platform was as easy-to-use as we thought. In fact, one pleasant receptionist wondered aloud whether we really needed to test as the platform was so simple (the quote was more along the lines of… what to you think…I’m stupid?).

We continue to look for good dentists in Chicago that fit our profile to fill out the geographic area….and are in the process of training up dentists in Atlanta, and will stay focused on using our proprietary matching technology to get the right patient with the right dentist at the right time.

So, champagne glasses raised as we pass through one more milestone. We have many more as we stay focused on making the right connections…

Cheers. L’chaim. And even nasdrovia.

It’s good to know we are not alone in our quest to make sense of technology for dentists….as a critical tool for improving everything in their operation (not just patient acquisition).

Today the Wall Street Journal ran a front page story about micropractices, which said “Some physicians and institutions are trying to harness technology to make family practices more manageable and profitable for doctors.” Amen to that, I say.

Well, I’ve got news for you: Dentists need to do this, too! In fact, in this competitive day and age, dentists have no choice. The bigger message dentists should take away from this article is that technology is not an add-on anymore, it’s a necessity if you want to improve your practice’s profitability, growth, and customer satisfaction.

Here’s why…tech can help you improve your patient experience from start to finish…from finding you, to the reminder platform for appointments, ongoing newsletters made easy, customized wellness mailings based on diagnosis, getting timely feedback from your patients, sharing with them positive anecdotes, creating two-way communication via ‘ask the dentist’ features on a web-site, etc…

It helps you with profitability as you can better plan your days and utilization of your time and your staff, you can process your claims faster (one of our board members Fred Horowitz has a great electronic claims management company named www.ansdirect.com - one of many players in the area but they help dentists get reimbursed much faster, lessen the hassle of dealing with the carriers, etc…), reduce appointment no-shows, and lower the costs of mailings, etc…Fred’s so passionate about it, he leads an industry association on the topic http://www.cooperativeexchange.org/

Personally, as a happy dental patient (thank you Dr. Tedford), I can tell you that I appreciate immediate access to tips from my dentist, emergency questions and answers, targeted content, etc…if you are not thinking about this, someone else will.

And it’s great to see more and more dentists—and reporters—finally coming around to this reality. Over on The Solo Practitioner blog, Dr. Vincent Pedre is spot-on in his passionate assessment of micropractices. I couldn’t agree more that modern technology makes it easier to achieve an ideal practice environment without extra staff or expenses.

Dental Practice Report had an article in the February issue by Keith Rossein that starts with….”Can a dental practice exist without a dot.com presence in 2007? Yes, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult.” Keith’s right.

Notice a trend here? We sure do and are happy to be a part of it. Just this week, I had the pleasure of meeting Bill Jackson of Planet DDS( http://www.planetdds.com/ ). They have built a web-based practice management platform that is much less expensive and easier to manage than the old software platforms dentists used to have to install (it’s the ASP model for those of you who know the jargon). If you are a dentist and you haven’t seen it, you should. Because it is hosted by them (think of your e-mail, which you can access securely from any computer with an internet connection), they can constantly upgrade it and improve it without the hassle of re-installing the software.

Be sure to watch this space to hear first-hand commentary from Chicago dentists who are using these technologies and more (including BRINGOdentist.com, of course!), and will discuss the benefits, challenges, and tips to using technology in your practice. There’s lots of good stuff just becoming available. The wave is building (so are the cliche’s).

Okay, that’s all for now. It’s Chicago and the midwinter meeting. I should be shmoozing, not posting.

Yours,

Mark

Happy New Year!

As regular readers of this blog know, we’ve been hinting at our the next big thing for BRINGO for the past couple of months. Well, that time is finally here… We are proud to announce the (soft) launch of Bringodentist.com — a new way for patients to find local dentist to match their needs via the web. Using our unique web to telephone technology, BringoDentist allows potential patients to find a high quality dentist in their area, and does the hard work of calling around to make sure there is a match with their criteria (location, preferred form of payment, appointment times, etc.).

We are currently available in only limited areas, but are aggressively building our network of high-quality providers. Check back at this space for more details on local availability and success stories.